Open Source Java Claims Its First Casualty: Graham Hamilton, Sun Fellow and VP, Quits @ JAVA DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL

Is this a warning sign? Brenda Michelson asked this question a few weeks ago. Compatibility is a key factor with Java. However I have found that once you move beyond simple POJO type implementations and move into the world of app servers, compatibility is generally lost.

Have you ever asked a vendor to support their application on more than one app server platform? The word port usually comes up.

Web Services Adoption

I was reading a post from Mike Herrick on SBA and EDA. Mike made a statement about the death of Web Services. Mike was talking about the WS-* set of standards in particular and not Web Services on a whole. It did get me thinking about the adoption rate of Web Services in general.

It's clear that the software industry thinks a lot of the future of Web Services. The plethora of acquisitions this past year is a testament to that. webMethods buys Infravio, HP buys Mercury (Systinet), Progress gets Sonic and Actional, IBM buys everybody else. Most of these products are heavy on governance. That would seem to imply a demand in the market for this type of technology.

I have been recently working on putting in a basic UDDI server. I was toying around with Microsoft's UDDI server which is included in their Windows Server 2003. What struck me was the lack of chatter on UDDI? If the adoption rate of Web Services is high then I would think UDDI would be a topic of conversation. It is not.

So to me the question becomes: Have most enterprises bought into the concept of Web Services? If so is the adoption rate just slow? Or are the vendors way the mark with their governance products? What do you think? How are Web Services really doing in the enterprise?

A Quantum Leap in Data Encryption

I'm not a security guy and I am certainly not a physics guy. But this is pretty cool on the cool meter. I have always wondered what folks did with quantum physics degrees.

TIBCO freeing up Business Studio - Column 2 - ebizQ

Alright I see a trend. :) Tibco releasing their BPM modeling tool for free is probably going to shake things up a little bit. They are changing the rules with the pure play EAI vendors. I wonder how webMethods will react to this news?

soapUI 1.6 final, web service integration and testing tool, released

I've used this tool a lot. It is a good one to have in your tool box. Very easy to use, not a lot of fuss.

Eclipse STP Project

There is an interesting story that is taking shape here. This is a recent article discussing the upcoming release of the STP platform for Eclipse. If you remember, I posted a thought (Culture Clash) about the webMethods purchase of Infravio. The quick summary of that was a discussion about Infravio's contribution to Eclipse and Apache versus the more closed culture at webMethods.

The STP tools project got a major infusion from Infravio (according to Infravio, the founding member). I also notice that the STP tool set is going to use the Celtix Open Source ESB. This is a product seeded from Iona.

Anybody else think this is weird? All of these folks are competitors or were at one point. How will all of this play out? Don't know but it will be interesting to watch. I'm especially interested to see how webMethods will absorb Infravio and how its own tool set will evolve. Will they abandon their own proprietary tool set in favor of the open Eclipse based tools? Or will they consume the functionality of Infravio into their own tools?

Web Services and SOA, Better that EAI?

I found this article over at the SOA Web Services Journal. While it is a good article from an attempt to explain WS-Security, WS-Addressing and BPEL from a technical perspective, it also generated some "say what?" questions for me.

This quote at the introduction:

People sometimes ask what a service-oriented architecture enables today that could not have been done with the older, proprietary integration stacks of the past 5 to 15 years, such as those from Tibco, IBM, or Vitria. One such ability is the greater degree of interoperability between heterogeneous technology stacks that is made possible by the standards SOA is built on, such as Web services and BPEL. Although interoperability is only one facet of the SOA value proposition, it is one that has become increasingly more important, due in large part to the evolving IT environment, merger and acquisition activity, and increased partner connectivity.

It becomes more understandable once you read who the authors are. They of course work for Oracle and a Microsoft Partner who are really promoting a product suite. The problem with this quote of course is it is simply not true or at the very least misleading. I don't think most folks bought Tibco, Vitria, IBM, webMethods, SeeBeyond etc to integrate technology stacks like Java and .Net. They bought these EAI platforms to integrate multiple proprietary software packages. Lets say SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Remedy, Mainframes, Java, .Net, EDI (Trading Partners)and the list goes on and on.

Those integration needs are still there. Some vendors like SAP, Oracle and Peoplesoft are evolving their offerings to include Web Services. But for the other million package applications out there, integration is an issue. Web Services doesn't solve the problem of legacy integration. Even for companies moving towards a SOA style of architecture, legacy integration is still an issue. The "private side" of a service still has to communicate/work with legacy packages in a lot of cases. I do think the concept of creating service wrappers around these legacy integrations is a good idea. However you should not think by using Web Services that you somehow don't have to deal with this issue. By the way all of the platforms referenced in the quote offer the same functionality that the vendors in the article are touting.

The other issue I had with the article is the concept of asynchronous processing. But I'm going to leave that for a future discussion.

Red Hat woes

You have to wonder if Microsoft is serious about this or are they just trying to smack Red Hat around a little bit.

Novell Shares Spike 20% As Wall St Journal Reports Microsoft To Start Reselling SUSE LINUX
— In a move that caused Red Hat shares to tumble 3.2% and Novell's to surge by 20% in the same period of trading today, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is going to start providing support for SUSE LINUX and that it is working too on Microsoft-Linux interoperability.

I guess it could be a response to Oracle's support of Red Hat. It is interesting to see both the upside and downside of Open Source at the same time. For customers, the upside is no lock-in to a particular vendor (Assuming you are not using any proprietary extensions). For vendors, the downside is you really only have your service/support offering to support you.